As if it wasn’t already…
Unfortunately, the result of Britain’s EU referendum has brought to my attention the fact that British people are now officially more stupid than Americans. Its been a point of pride, something we’ve held over our common tongue brethren for centuries but now our most favourite past time comes to an end. This blog is founded on the very principle that English people know what’s best for Americans and American sports. The decision to leave the EU now means I have no claims to this superior knowledge anymore. We’re all idiots now.
There’s still a long way to go to reconcile with the atrocious decision that’s been made and politicians can talk about ‘uniting’ and ‘going forward together’ but the fact is that this is just bad for the country, bad for Europe and bad for the world. I must confess to barely even entertaining the idea that this would ever happen. Living in London and having social circles where everyone is voting Remain almost insulates you against the fact that anyone would vote for Leave. Polls were all in favour of Remain and when I went to sleep Thursday night, exit polls were projecting the Remain victory to be even larger than they had initially thought. So how on earth did we get here?!
Failure of Liberalism vs. Populism/Xenophobia
People are unhappy with the status quo. About 30 seconds after I read the first article on Friday morning declaring a Leave victory, my thoughts turned immediately to the US election and the similarities there. The level of inequality between London and the rest of the country, New York/LA/urban areas and the middle/South, the 1% and everyone else, are real issues and finding a solution to this problem is perhaps the single most important question of the immediate future. Polls had Remain comfortably ahead pretty much the whole campaign and the belief was that the Undecideds would vote for the status quo (staying in the EU), instead of the risky option of Leave. This proved to be false. People are so unhappy with their circumstances that they’d prefer to risk the current stability to ‘shake things up’. Whether or not I agree with their right to be unhappy, its clearly a massive problem and one that is rearing its head in the US.
The easy position is to blame immigration, free trade and weak/corrupt politicians for the mess and ‘taking back our country’ as the solution. Again, the rhetoric in the UK is the same as the US. The message that immigrants are stealing jobs and companies are outsourcing to China/India/Vietnam resonates and there needs to be a stronger counter-message to this line of thinking to stop the world going down a worrying path. An interesting anecdote, I was getting an Uber home recently and the driver had the radio on to a call-in talk show. A lady called in and did the usual rant about the government and then said “What we need in this country [the UK] is a strong leader like Donald Trump to fix things”. I asked the driver to turn off the radio and dismissed her out of hand as some lone nut job. Clearly, the politics Trump espouses resonates across the Atlantic, with white people feeling they are under attack.
I’ve seen two charts that disturb me greatly. First, people who voted to Leave were from areas of the country that are most reliant on staying in the EU. The turkeys that voted for Thanksgiving. I imagine the same might be true of the US, in terms of free trade and globalisation and yet this message is not getting through.
We Are Living In A Post-Truth World
The problem with the pro-globalisation/pro-immigration argument is that people don’t seem to care about logical arguments, scientific data and ‘proof’. Its easier to blame a race of people than to explain that free trade lowers prices and makes us all better off. The main slogan for the Leave campaign said that ‘we send £350mn a week to Brussels and instead we’ll spend it on the NHS and social services”. Hours after Leave won, the leaders admitted this was a lie and that in fact, they wouldn’t be spending this ‘saved’ money on improving healthcare. A quote from Brexiter Iain Duncan Smith this morning about the Leave campaign promises: “Our promises were a series of possibilities”. The John Oliver clip you sent talks about the £350mn figure and debunks with some simple investigation. But people aren’t willing to actually look into these figures to see what they mean. Its like being back in high school where intellect and thinking, are mocked in favour of bigotry and catchy slogans.
A few weeks ago, Michael Gove, one of the key Leave politicians was asked about how he responds to claims from the World Bank, OECD, social scientists, academics, Barack Obama, researchers, economists, major international companies, etc that leaving the EU would be a terrible move for Britain. “People in this country have had enough of experts” he declared. We all laughed at him and his general inability to form a coherent argument in favour of Leaving, and it again strengthened the view that no one would listen to idiots like Gove, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. And yet, how prescient that remark was and how it seems now. Trump can’t utter a single sentence without spewing a torrent of lies, conspiracy theories and misinformation. We have all these fact checking media outlets that brand him as a ‘liar liar pants on fire’ and it won’t ultimately matter because no one seems to care what is truth and what is not. Is it because there are too many facts, figures and opinions out there? Is it because people pick and choose the ones they want and fit them into their narrative? I lean towards this latter one, as it just seems like people have staked out their sides already and aren’t looking to be swayed one way or another.
Second chart. This notes that if you had a tertiary degree you voted Remain, if you didn’t, you voted to Leave. I really don’t want to disparage people without University education as being less informed but there is clearly something to be said for using evidence based research and the scientific method that encourages people to look for data and scrutinise it when they find it.
Polarisation Means Things Aren’t Likely To Get Better
I’ve already touched on the Have’s vs. Have Nots, Educated vs Undereducated, Urban vs. Rural and Red vs. Blue but it probably bears repeating that these differences aren’t going to magically repair themselves. If you haven’t seen already, look at the UK voting results map. Northern Ireland, Scotland and London, major cities voted overwhelmingly to Remain, Wales and the rest of England to Leave. Its no wonder that people see politicians as weak when the level of polarisation is so high that we can’t compromise to get anything done. There’s joke petitions going around the Internet to request that London becomes an independent city state still a part of the EU. Or that it breaks away from England with Scotland and Northern Ireland to form ‘Remainia’. I thought the UK was generally less polarised than the US and it still might be but this was again, a big wake up call for me. How are we going to get back to a less polarised country? I have no idea. People on the Remain side are bemoaning Democracy as a whole, hoping for a 2nd Referendum or for the government to simply ignore the wishes of the majority. People on Leave want demagogues and ‘strong leaders’ to get things done. Seems like Democracy has just turned two sides against each other with little hope for reconciliation.
Lessons For The US
If Trump was more organised, better funded and had some semblance of control over his mouth, I would be expecting a Republican victory this November based on the Brexit decision. its been 48 hours so I’m probably still wracked with doom and gloom and maybe I’ll be more optimistic in the future but right now, things look really bad. Hillary is winning outright in a lot of polls and Trump keeps self-sabotaging but, we’re not in July yet, he has 4-5 months to get himself together and form a proper campaign infrastructure. Unfortunately, Hillary is an incredibly beatable candidate and he could easily be winning at this point. He won the Republican nomination months ago and could have spent that time crushing her. Luckily for us, he’s got 30 campaign staff and $1.3mn and doesn’t understand how to run a campaign. Anyway, point being that Hillary needs to think more about Polarisation, Populism and Post-Truth (the 3 Ps!) and come up with a way of convincing people outside of the traditional means.
Another critical point – Brexit was another failure of polling. As I mentioned, Remain was comfortably ahead most of the way and yet this happened. We can’t trust polling data gathered in traditional ways anymore: companies are still relying on randomised phone calls to a cross-section of the population. Instead, those conducted through the internet and smartphones are increasingly seen as more accurate, according to a couple of articles I was reading on it. In fact, online polls consistently put the Leave vote ahead by 1.2 percentage points, compared to live phone surveys that gave the Remain camp a 2.6 pps lead. The UK election last year was a massive shock to the polling community, as was the Republican primary along with a number of other polling failures in 2015. Its something I’ll take into consideration from now on when looking at the upcoming US election.
The point in all this being, I wouldn’t underestimate Trump and the grievances of his followers. There’s so much time for him to turn things around and simply dismissing his brand of populism, xenophobia and aversion to the truth is a huge mistake and a very dangerous attitude.
Written By An Englishman 